Background This qualitative study explores consumers’ knowledge, perceptions, and reported propensity to use hospital quality information and proposes a communication strategy aimed at supporting the use of a prototypical decision-support tool for choosing a hospital. Methods Eight focus...

This research investigates changes in brand loyalty as households pass from one stage of the household life cycle to another. Analysing 45 brands in three consumer product categories in the UK, we find that the changes follow a U shape pattern. Brand loyalty declines sharply as households shift...

During international disputes do consumers boycott an adversary country’s products? We show that during the 2003 US-France dispute over the Iraq War, the market share of French-sounding, US supermarket brands declined. The dispute was a negative shock to US consumers’ associations with...

Sponsored search is the mechanism whereby where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results. Based on prior literature, we draw an analogy between these markets and financial markets. We use the analogy as well as the key...

Shopping malls contribute to business more significantly than traditional markets which were viewed as simple convergence of supply and demand. Shopping malls attract buyers and sellers, and induce customers providing enough time to make choices as well as a recreational means of shopping....

Recent literature finds evidence that prices decrease during demand peaks. This paper argues that the price decrease is an artefact of ignoring product differentiation. We develop a simple individual demand model which shows that at periods of exogenous high demand, consumers migrate towards...

This paper extends prior research on consumer knowledge beliefs and word-of-mouth transmission. Findings from four studies suggest that people compensate for unfavorable discrepancies between their actual and ideal consumer knowledge with heightened efforts to signal knowledgeability through the...

We demonstrate that brand relationships affect perceptions of a brand’s closeness to the self, resulting in mindset congruency effects when matched with an appropriate construal level. Brand relationships that are closer (distal) to the self yield improved evaluations when brand information is...

Economists, psychologists, and marketing researchers rely on measures of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in estimating demand for private and public goods and in designing optimal price schedules. Existing market research techniques for measuring WTP differ in whether they provide an...

Research on consumer-brand relationships (CBR) has examined the CBR - brand loyalty link, but surprisingly little is known about the cultural and institutional settings that enable this link. We meta-analyze how and why different CBR constructs (e.g. love, identification) drive loyalty better in...